


eye of the beholder

by quietmoon



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dragons, M/M, half-assed worldbuilding, lizard!iwa-chan, the beginning plays homage to luke skywalker ayyy, v vague princess and the frog stuff going on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2020-07-27 23:35:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20054380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietmoon/pseuds/quietmoon
Summary: Tooru is fifteen, after an argument turned fight turned one-sided drunken brawl with his father, when he decides Iwa-chan is his best friend, black spikes and green eyes and scales and all.





	eye of the beholder

**Author's Note:**

> _reposted from my [orphaned work](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11268366) with AO3's permission_
> 
> i wrote this for saso and then forgot it existed rip

Living in the back end of nowhere isn't fun at all, Tooru decides at four years old. At five years old, he learns it doesn't matter what he decides in the end, and starts helping his dad on the water farm. That doesn't stop him from wandering further than he should into the desert and shrubland surrounding their homestead, exploring as far as he can in the few hours he gets to himself before exhaustion overtakes him and he goes to bed for the day.

Water farming is as mundane as it gets, Tooru decides at eight. Drawing water out of the air and ground and storing it in magical vials isn't exactly his idea of adventure and excitement. He'd rather fight monsters, ride dragons, conquer kingdoms, feel his lungs shake with desperation as he swims through a storm away from a pirate ship. But no -- alas, he's the son of water farmers, the grandson of water farmers, probably from a long line of desert nomads turned water farmers. Cloud extraction isn't exactly high up on skills that'll help on the battlefield, either, and how's Tooru going to travel the world and fight evil when he's grown up like that?

So that's why, also at eight years old, he starts training sword-fighting with sticks against trees, robbing himself of another two hours of sleep. It's worth it, even if his mother shouts at him most evenings when he returns home with bruises and a rueful grin.

Stumbling across strange creatures isn't unusual when you live this far out of the cities and towns. Most were hunted or smoked out centuries ago in more populated areas, but here in the Arcane Shrublands it's a lovely yet common surprise to find an abandoned wraith nest or dull shedded dragon scales.

He's ten when he meets the baby dragon. It's not exactly a dragon, he thinks. Way too small to be one. He'd assume it was the mundane counterpart, a bearded dragon most people call them, except in the place of the sanded yellow-lime scales it has charcoal, gray and blue ones. And the eyes aren't round and dark as they should be, they're a mossy green with a sharp slanted pupil.

Whatever it is, it's kind of hideous, and Tooru gladly tells it so on their first meeting. Later that evening, while he's dodging imaginery stabs and rolling to the right to leap at a tree with his sword-stick, something bites him hard on the foot. He lets out a shrill squawk of a yell, turning to glare accusatorily at the... _thing_ staring impassively back at him before turning and scrambling onto a nearby boulder.

It's two more evenings of that. On the third, Tooru takes the lizard -- christened _Iwa-chan_ for the rock perch it likes to look down snootily at Tooru from -- home. What's a farm without any animals, after all?

Tooru is fifteen, after an argument turned fight turned one-sided drunken brawl with his father, when he decides Iwa-chan is his best friend, black spikes and green eyes and scales and all.

At nineteen years old, Tooru has grown into himself in all ways a boy can. He's tall, strong from farm labour and sharp from the magic casting that accompanies it. His voice is deep, skin smooth and hands calloused, and in the village a day's ride over he's known among certain groups of young girls as a prime bachelor to put their hopes into.

Even his eccentricities are admired, particularly among his father's friends. At first they teased him, put him down, scorned him even for his ever-growing yearning to travel and explore, his thirst for knowledge of spells far outside the usual span of knowledge of a water farmer, the lizard perpetually perched on his shoulder whispering into his ear. Then he rigged out his family's farm with a system twice as efficient as before, and stubbornly weened his parents off of their alcohol dependency, and saved his younger sister from a pack of sand wolves all by himself, and that's when the men of the town started taking him more seriously.

"Iwa-chan~," Tooru sings. "Iwa-chan, he's a lizard dragon boy, Iwa-chan, Iwa-chan~"

The bearded dragon perched on his shoulder nips gently at his jaw, a sign that he knows Tooru is singing about him and doesn't appreciate it, and will let him go on anyway. He may be an animal, and a mundane one at that, but Tooru is sure -- has learned through the ten years they've spent together -- that he's pretty much a person in scaly form. It's like he can hear a voice in his head, an exasperated but fond _stupid_ as he traipses through the shrubbery to his usual training ground.

Years of trampling has packed the dirt tight underfoot. It's nice; like a little home he's made for himself in the wild. Tooru feels more at peace out here than at home anyway, even though he and his parents have passed the troublesome phase in their relationship for the most part. It's nice to feel like the whole world is yours for the taking, rather than confined by class and status and wealth and means. And geography, of course. There's also the fact that he's a thousand leagues away from civilization in any direction -- or at least, that's what it feels like.

It was already dark out when he left, not that it matters. He knows his way to his clearing as well as the back of his hand. The cool night air on his skin, the rough fabric of his shirt rubbing against his back, the soft pinch of Iwa-chan's claws on his shoulder -- it's all familiar to him, it feels like home, and just like that he can feel the tension of the day bleed out of his neck and shoulders. He tilts his head a little as he walks, nuzzling the lizard with his hair and cheek. A soft clicking sounds as reply, soothing and quiet.

Once he reaches the trianing ground Tooru doesn't hesitate in picking up one of the many wooden swords he's carved himself; its handle is worn, too smooth to produce even the slightest splinter. A skinny thing, designed to be used with a partner. He wanted to try making double-edged curved swords but making that with wood is asking for more trouble than it's worth. As he does so, the lizard scrambles down his arm and settles down on his favourite perch to judge Tooru's swordplay.

"And besides," he mutters, half to Iwa-chan, half to himself, "if I got used to the weighting of wooden swords and trained with them it would make getting used to the real thing all the harder."

Iwa-chan gives him a beady stare as if to say, "look what you're holding in your hand, stupid".

And Tooru twirls the wooden sword with a flourish, ending it with the tip pointing at his pet dramatically. Iwa-chan doesn't even blink. "I won't be using a one-handed weapon like this ever, obviously, Iwa-chan. It's too clumsy. I want something _nimble_\--" He punctuates it with a complicated twirl-turn-parry-turn-slash in the opposite direction. "Something fast and flexible. That I can use spells with instead of on."

He glances back at Iwa-chan for affirmation. He just blinks at him, face unmoving. 'That makes no sense', it says.

"Shut up," Tooru mutters, turning away to hide a grin.

The next four hours are taken up with as complex swordplay as you can practice alone, Tooru panting and sweating as he perfects his own style of fighitng, Iwa-chan watching with his beady slanted eyes all the while. It's only when the birds start their morning rounds and the world turns pale and purple with the beginning of dawn does Tooru allow himself to sit down, exhausted and drenched and satiated, beside Iwa-chan's boulder.

He pulls off his shirt and lets the cool air, still waiting for the sun to warm it, raise goosebumps along his skin. A big sigh escapes his lips. "That went well, Iwa-chan," he mutters, absentmindedly stroking the lizard beside his head. Iwa-chan moved towards him the second Tooru made himself comfortable, enjoying the warmth of his skin probably. He nuzzles him fondly. "That went well."

Quietly, they watch the sun rise. Light peeks across the wide open space, through the bushes some as as tall as three men and some knee level, across the planes of the Arcane Shrublands. Sleepiness pervades his senses, but Tooru had purpose in training all night.

"Happy birthday to me." He cracks his neck to the side, and groans deep in his chest with satisfaction. "Guess who's a man now, hmm?" 

Iwa-chan bumps his nose on his cheek. Tooru smirks.

"That's right," he coos, "that's right, Iwa-chan, I am, aren't I? Twenty years old, lucky me. And you know what also means, don't you? Of course you do~" He turns and gazes adoringly at the scaly black thing. "It's a decade since you, asshole you are, bit me on the ankle and scarred me for life." He did, as well. Even if Iwa-chan sometimes licks at the tiny scar with his forked little tongue as if to apologise, Tooru will never let it go.

His soft tone contradicts the biting words. Iwa-chan tilts his head to the side. His pupils narrow slightly. Tooru can't help but giggle. "You're--" He leans forward, nose to nose with Iwa-chan. "God, you're so damn ugly," he snorts, before leaning forward and giving him a tiny peck on the tip of his nose. "I love you anyway, though."

"Yeah, no shit," comes the reply, and Tooru has exactly half a second to snicker to himself before he freezes. Freezes, opens his eyes, stares forward blindly. Blinks again. Reminds himself to breathe. Looks up.

Green eyes look back at him. Not slanted though, and not beady, and definitively not the eyes of the lizard he's lovingly cared for these past ten years. Tooru's mouth opens and closes like a fish. He's lost for words, which--

"That's a first," the voice says, or rather, the owner of the voice, that being the human that is sitting -- lying? -- right where his beautiful ugly Iwa-chan was exactly five seconds ago.

Tooru looks up slowly, mouth dry. It takes three swallows to try form the words. "...I-Iwa-chan?"

The man is strong, and lean, and shirtless. His trousers are the same ripped peasant-cloth that Tooru's are. He's got dark hair, black as his scales, spiky as his beard, and eyes the same mossy green as before. Tooru can't breathe. His lizard just--

"God, finally," the man is saying, leaning back to sit up on the boulder. He rolls his shoulders back, the muscles of his torso rippling as he does. He takes a great big breath, holds it for a moment, before letting it all out in one long whoosh. That's when he finally looks down again at Tooru, who's still trying to blink himself back to reality when Iwa-chan was Iwa-chan.

But the second they make eye contact, Tooru can't help it -- he lets out a loud unelegant bark of laughter. "Y-You're--" Cackles overtake him, robbing him of breath, and he has to physically calm himself down enough to say, "Of course you're got frowny eyebrows. Of _course_ you do. Grumpy old-- _hahaha_, grumpy old _man_!"

Iwa-chan Human Version stares at him in the same way as before, judgmental and silent. But then a soft grin peeks out, and before his eyes it grows into a blinding beaming smile. It's funny; lizard Iwa-chan was about as ugly as human Iwa-chan _isn't_.

"You saved me," Iwa-chan says, eyes soft.

"You're my lizard," Tooru shoots back blankly.

Iwa-chan waves a hand in the air as if to brush it off -- his skin is tan, 'sun-kissed' one would say -- and lithely hops off the boulder to sit beside Tooru. "I was cursed," he begins, and it's all Tooru can do to silently nod along as he listens, "by the leader of a colony of dragons almost a century ago. My family hunted his to near extinction in the span of a decade, so as revenge he kidnapped me -- the only son and heir-- and turned me into a mundane bearded dragon."

He falls silent as if waiting for Tooru to say something.

"That sucks," he ends up with.

"Yeah," Iwa-chan agrees with a solemn nod. "But cause you kissed me on the nose after ten years, here I am. Thanks for that."

"That's... convenient."

"Yeah."

"Not that I'm complaining."

"Me neither," Iwa-chan laughs darkly.

Tooru winces. "God, I changed and pissed and cried in front of you and everything."

Iwa-chan snorts. "You're so ugly when you cry."

"Excuse you, I'm damn radiant."

Iwa-chan rolls his eyes. Tooru pointedly notices that he doesn't argue that point, and smirks to himself. _Still my pet._

"So like... why did your family hunt the dragons?"

"Uh." He rubs the back of his head. "It was complicated. They burned a bunch of our villages, my granddad waged a war or two, it was a mess. And of course--" He rolls his eyes again, something Tooru can already tell is a habit. "They all decide to take it out on the young prince. Because logic."

"You're a prince?"

"Yeah, didn't I mention that?"

Tooru shakes his head silently. _Well, I wanted adventure in far away lands..._ "So what now?"

"Well, I have to return probably, and get rid of the evil that's taken over while I was gone. All my family's dead by now, anyway. I was the sole heir, you know?"

"That sucks," Tooru says again.

"Not really. Like I said, wars against dragons."

"Fair."

"Yeah."

Even though they just met (as mutual humans) for the first time, Tooru feels like he knows Iwa-chan intimately. So when Iwa-chan glances over with a knowing look, face carefully neutral, Tooru knows something big is about to happen.

"You wanna come along?" Iwa-chan asks casually.

Tooru blinks. _Adventure. Magic. Potential epic love story._

"Yeah." He shrugs. "Sounds like fun."

And so, at nineteen years old, Oikawa Tooru knows he wants to explore the world and have adventures and that his best friend is a mundane dragon called Iwa-chan.

At twenty, he sets out with his best friend in tow, and prepares to do just that.


End file.
